122, Regent’s Park Road, N.W.

Dear Sir,

Here is the answer to your questions!

1.
By the economic relations, which we regard as the determining basis of the history of society, we understand the way in which the people of a given society produce their means of subsistence and exchange the products among themselves (insofar as division of labour exists). Thus the *entire* technique of production and transport is included there. According to our conception, this technique also determines the mode of exchange, further the distribution of the products, and with that, after the dissolution of gentile society, also the division into classes, hence the relations of lordship and bondage, hence the state, politics, law, etc. Furthermore, under economic relations are included the *geographical basis* on which they operate and the actually transmitted remnants of earlier economic stages of development, which have often persisted only through tradition or *vis inertiae*, as well, of course, as the external milieu surrounding this form of society.

If, as you say, technique largely depends on the state of science, science depends far more still on the *state and the needs* of technique. If society has a technical need, that helps science forward more than ten universities. The whole of hydrostatics (Torricelli, etc.) was called forth by the need for regulating the mountain streams of Italy in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. We have known anything rational about electricity only since its technical applicability was discovered. In Germany, however, people have unfortunately become accustomed to writing the history of the sciences as if they had fallen from the sky.

2.
We regard economic conditions as that which, in the last instance, conditions historical development. But race is itself an economic factor. Here, however, two points must not be overlooked:

a) Political, juridical, philosophical, religious, literary, artistic, etc., development is based on economic development. But all these react upon one another and also upon the economic basis. It is not that the economic situation is *cause, solely active*, while everything else is only passive effect. There is, rather, interaction on the basis of the economic necessity, which always ultimately asserts itself. The state, for example, exerts influence by means of protective tariffs, free trade, good or bad fiscal policy, and even the deadly exhaustion and impotence of the German philistine, arising from the economic misery of Germany from 1648 to 1830 and expressing itself first in pietism, then in sentimentality and cringing bondage to princes and nobility, was not without economic effect. It was one of the greatest hindrances to recovery and was first shaken when the Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars made the chronic misery acute. It is, therefore, not, as people here and there conveniently try to imagine, an automatic effect of the economic situation; on the contrary, men make their history themselves, only in a given milieu that conditions them, on the basis of actual relations already existing, among which the economic relations, however much they may be influenced by the other political and ideological ones, are still *in the last instance* the decisive ones, forming the red thread that runs through and alone leads to understanding.

b) Men make their own history, but until now not with a collective will according to a collective plan, not even within a definitely delimited given society. Their efforts conflict, and for that very reason in all such societies *necessity* prevails, whose complement and phenomenal form is *chance*. The necessity that here asserts itself through all chance is once again ultimately economic necessity. Here the so-called great men come in for treatment. That such and such a man and precisely this one arises at this particular time in this given country is of course pure chance. But put him aside and there is demand for a substitute, and this substitute is found, *tant bien que mal*, but in the long run he is found. That Napoleon, precisely this Corsican, should have been the military dictator whom the French Republic, exhausted by its own wars, rendered necessary, was chance; but that, if a Napoleon had been lacking, another would have filled the place, is proved by the fact that a man has always been found as soon as he was needed: Caesar, Augustus, Cromwell, etc. If Marx discovered the materialist conception of history, Thierry, Mignet, Guizot, and all the English historians up to 1850 prove that efforts were made towards it, and the discovery of the same conception by Morgan proves that the time was ripe for it and it simply *had to be* discovered.

So with all other chance events and seemingly chance events in history. The further the particular sphere we are investigating departs from the economic and approaches the purely abstract ideological, the more we shall find that it exhibits chance elements in its development, the more its curve proceeds in zigzags. But draw the average axis of the curve, and you will find that the longer the period considered and the larger the field thus treated, the more closely this axis runs approximately parallel to the axis of economic development.

The greatest obstacle to correct understanding in Germany is the irresponsible neglect, in literature, of economic history. It is so hard, not only to rid oneself of the historical notions drummed in at school, but even more to scrape together the material necessary for this. Who, for instance, has even read old G. v. Gülich, who in his dry compilation of material yet contains such a wealth of matter for the elucidation of countless political facts!

Incidentally, I think the fine example that Marx gave in the *Eighteenth Brumaire* should already provide you with considerable information on your questions, precisely because it is a practical example. I also believe I have already touched on most points in *Anti-Dühring* I, chapters 9–11 and II, 2–4, as well as III, 1, or introduction, and then in the last section of the *Feuerbach*.

I beg you not to weigh every word in the above on gold scales, but to keep the connection in view; I regret that I have not the time to write to you with the exact elaboration I should have to for the public.

Please present my compliments to Mr …¹ and thank him in my name for sending the …, which greatly amused me.

Very respectfully yours,
F. Engels

¹ The name of the sender and the item sent were rendered illegible in the printed source.